I rationalized my decision to continue with my day as planned, telling myself that I would be showing solidarity by visiting Celmins’s show. Each of the 20-odd pieces in the exhibition capture moments of either horrific destruction or potential destruction—frozen first by photography, and then re-captured by Celmins’ careful hand. The intersection of art and politics is rarely successful, and often artists who attempt it fall into the realm of didacticism and propaganda, or worse, aestheticizing violence. But Celmins’s images of conflict and destruction, painted during the Vietnam War, avoid these pitfalls while retaining their own kind of force and power.

The works were all completed while Celmins was a graduate student at UCLA, before she began creating the quiet, meditative surfaces depicting night skies, spider webs, and horizonless seascapes for which she is known. The subjects range from a brooding rhinocerous to a smoke and flame-engulfed beach, and almost every painting is rendered in the subdued monochromatic scheme that characterizes most of Celmins’s oeuvre.

Perhaps most captivating are Celmins’s paintings of warplanes. Based on images from library books about World War I and World War II, German Plane, Flying Fortress, Burning Plane and Suspended Plane all feature a single airplane hanging in space. Although the latter two fighter planes are shown breaking apart on the brink of explosion and German Plane is adorned with the Swastika symbol, which now seems to be the universal symbol for ultimate violence, the images all feel strangely placid.

When Celmins discussed Suspended Plane in Season 2 of Art in the Twenty-First Century, she contemplated the source of the stillness in an image that some might see as dramatic. “It came out of me painting objects, single objects on the still life, and then I sort of shifted… to painting objects that were found in photographs that were no longer objects now but machines. Mostly airplanes. I think of them as sort of still lifes still.”

Yet Celmins maneuvers these images into the realm of the placid still life without beautifying the suffering and violence surrounding them. Seeing Celmins’s warplane paintings immediately brought to mind Gerhard Richter’s Düsenjäger, painted almost at the same moment, in 1963. Richter’s painting of the fighter jet, while also painted with a limited palette and clear reference to photography, is far more kinetically charged. Celmins’s paintings place the viewer slightly above the planes, while Richter’s jet tilts menacingly to the side, sending the viewer below them.

Both artists grew up in Europe during World War II. A native of Dresden, Germany, Richter and his family were active in the Nazi Party, while Celmins, born in Latvia, endured attacks from Germany throughout her childhood. Given their respective biographies, it is easy to fall into the trap of reading Richter as the aggressor and Celmins as a victim. Yet there is a distinct sense of aggression in Richter’s work that never arises in that of Celmins.

In fact, Celmins imbues the images with such placidity that she disempowers her subjects. In her Art in the Twenty-First Century segment, she explained how the warplane paintings relate to her own history. “I painted this in the middle of the Vietnam War. I was sort of remembering the planes when I was in Europe myself in 1944, just a small child. I remembered the airplanes. I’d never seen one of course but I heard them, you know?”

In describing her more recent work, Celmins speaks of finding emotionally potent images and “neutralizing” them. Perhaps the forces of her earlier practice are not so different. While seeing disaster can be devastating to the psyche, there is nothing more horrifying than a bogeyman with no face. But by depicting the source of those noises that had terrified her as a child, Celmins renders them impotent. Repicturing mass media images of war in modestly sized handmade monochromes, Celmins neither glamorizes violence nor explicitly condemns it. She simply strips it of its power. And this gesture, in and of itself, is incredibly powerful.

Thanks for posting this – I saw what I think was the same show at the Menil in Houston, and was really struck by the gentleness of Celmins’ hand given the subject matter, but more taken by what she reinvests in the images. After all she isn’t simply stripping the power from the content; rather she seems to divert it through attending to the details of media images that are in fact already rendered powerless by their proliferation.
It’s funny though that you felt momentarily perplexed as to whether to join the protest rather than visit Celmins’ show: an instance of art vs. politics in the most literal sense. I am interested in the politics of gesture through which Celmins’ paintings come into being, perhaps not always, but certainly here. Celmins strips her found images of their political currency – the same kind of “political” that was of concern to the protesters you passed. Her gentle attention is sufficiently political as a gestural response though, addressing not the content but the media. Her brush strokes, the depth of surface and the occasional lack of resolution between figure and ground, slow these images right down from their original televised or reproduced dissemination so that we might actually be able to think about what is going on.

A school building was fenced off with barbed wire in Espoo, Finland in 1908 (see the picture in the link). Swedes fenced off school buildings with barbed wire, in order to ban children the access to a school.

The Swedish government was responsible for the most iron ore the Nazis received. Kiruna-Gällivare ore fields in Northern Sweden were all important to Nazi Germany.

These massive deliveries of iron ore and military facilities from Sweden to Nazi Germany lengthened World War II. Casualties of the war have been estimated at 20 million killed in Europe. How many of them died due to Sweden’s material support to Nazi Germany, is not known.